Recent research on the long-term effects of parental divorce has provided few clear answers as to how experiencing a parental divorce while growing up may affect an individual's subsequent romantic love relationships. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationship between parental divorce and young adults' romantic love relationships. The literature on the long-term effects of parental divorce has generally paid very little attention to subjects' perspectives on how their parents' divorce affected them. However, recent research on traumatic life events has shown that subjects' interpretations of an event are intimately related to how that event affects them. The meaning that a person creates about a traumatic life event has profound consequences for adjustment to that event. The present study used a written narrative method to solicit young adults' views of their own strengths and weaknesses in romantic relationships, and how these were influenced by their family experiences. In order to avoid unintentionally pressuring subjects to discuss parental divorce, subjects were not informed that the study was about parental divorce until after the data were collected. They were encouraged to write freely in response to three openended questions. The first asked them to describe their strengths and weaknesses in romantic relationships, the second asked them to explain how they came to be the way they are in romantic relationships, and the third asked them how their family experiences might have influenced their romantic relationships. Three times as many young adults with divorced parents reported having poor relationships with one or both parents than those with married parents. Students from divorced households also reported experiencing much more interparental conflict than students from the non-divorced group. Despite describing these negative family experiences, subjects with divorced parents reported feeling as successful in their romantic relationships as their peers with married parents. Much of their success seemed to be due to their insight, creativity, and motivation. By overlooking the personal understandings that adult children of divorce have about their parents' divorce, the literature on divorce might have overlooked a great deal of their strength and resilience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-6091 |
| Date | 01 January 1996 |
| Creators | Hayashi, Gina Marie |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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